Lorna Simpson
Since the beginning of her career in the mid-1980s, Lorna Simpson has been well known for her conceptual photographs and videos that challenge historical and preconceived views of racial and sexual identity. The artist will speak on the occasion of FOCUS: Lorna Simpson, the first museum exhibition to feature the artist’s large-scale acrylic, ink, and silkscreened paintings.

Unlike most famous artists, KAWS has something few in visual art actually enjoy: rabid fans who wait on line for days just to see what his latest project will be. What makes this even more noteworthy is that he himself is a fan, subject to the same process of collecting stuff as a way of constructing one's identity as the kids around the globe who fetishize his work.

Ryan McGinness' approach to art and the art world is sardonic yet earnest, a mature version of the rebellious ethos that defined his youth in 90s skate culture. He’s soft-spoken and very tall, a gentle giant from Virginia Beach, long and far away from his current space on the top floor of a six-story former factory in New York's Chinatown. Beckett Mufson, “Ryan McGinness Thinks You’re Looking at Art Wrong,” The Creators Project, April 22, 2016

Merris’ sensibility is as organic and fluid as it is rigorous, as filled with wonder as it is informed by a sense of scientific reason, and it consistently navigates between such positions, seeing them not as oppositional, but naturally and intimately connected.

Kandel’s new book “The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind and Brain” takes us back to turn-of-the-century Vienna, the place of his birth, and he writes about the salons there, where artists could mingle with writers and physicians and scientists. . . . But this isn't just an art history book. Kandel also gets deep into the science of the mind, what happens in the brain when we see a beautiful work of art, how it affects our emotions, how we recognize objects and faces, too. It is written by a neuroscientist, after all.

My biggest challenge in writing this book has been to leave the series as free as Stella leaves the novel. Before I could set it free however, I had to take it in, to see and to know its proliferating parts. Robert K. Wallace, from “Pictorial Voyage, More Than Meets the Eye” in Frank Stella’s Moby-Dick: Words and Shapes